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From: hojo@cbnewsl.att.com (HC Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: TOS 1.4 pinhead, FATSPEED
Summary: pinhead; Yes  fatspeed; No
Message-ID: <1991Jan22.160120.16423@cbnewsl.att.com>
Date: 22 Jan 91 16:01:20 GMT
References: <14597@milton.u.washington.edu> <1991Jan18.212946.24607@opusc.csd.scarolina.edu>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 43

In article <1991Jan18.212946.24607@opusc.csd.scarolina.edu>, ken@opusc.csd.scarolina.edu (Ken Sallenger) writes:
> In article <14597@milton.u.washington.edu> ramsiri@blake.u.washington.edu asks:
> => Are pinhead and FATSPEED incompatible/unnecessary? with 1.4?
> 
1.
FATSPEED was a neat upgrade for TOS 1.2 to get around the SLOW down on HD
as they filled up. (Yes and other improvements as well).

TOS 1.4 has fixed this, and added a good working cache.

2.
pinhead allows you to take advantage of a new feature in TOS 1.4; namely
whether to ZERO the Bss or not.

Like MS/DOS TOS normally clears ALL unused memory that is initially assigned
to a process.  On multi-meg processors this is somewhat slow.  (Again TOS 1.4
uses better code and does clear faster.).  There is a new bit in the process
header that indicates that TOS need not clear bss, as the process will do its
own initialization.

3.
Also a note on poolfix3 and poolfix4.
poolfix3 is the OFICIAL, ATARI program, freely distributed to the net.
It allows increasing the caches in TOS 1.4.

We (on the net) tried to suppress the name poolfix4, but I see it raised again.
This was a reverse engineered version from Germany that set out to add
their protocol for TSR programs; but was also  substantially improved
(Authors words) which means that it is not supported or blessed by Atari.

I have not seen any comment as to failures with "poolfix4" so it may well
be safe.

To Summarize:
Dont use FATSPEED with TOS1.4
Pinhead will speed loading programs if they do not require initialized BSS.
Use Poolfix3 or whatever to improve the performance of the internal caches
in TOS 1.4.

Howard Johnson
ATT BELL LABS
att!lzsc!hcj
hcj@lzsc.att.com